And yet, no comments about acid on young women, the bombing of children, the torture of innocents. Ya gotta wonder what kind of deal he has worked out with the Taliban when we pull out. I suspect this will add to the din and work in favor of Obama's desire to withdraw before the election this year.

As for the act itself, if actually true - the Taliban reap what the sow.

Not so bad as hanging the charred remains of body part from a bridge, but no Muslim will ever make that comparison.....I don't know how vile the act is, but the act of recording and uploading it is extremely stupid.

If this involved civilians or noncombatants, I would be pissed, and have plenty to say about it, but not being a warrior myself, I will not tell them how to treat the bodies of their vanquished in combat, who moments earlier were trying to kill them. This is between warriors. I wish they didn't do it, but I won't judge such men in that situation. I'm not worthy of that. I'm fine with whatever the Marine do about it,including nothing or the most sever punishment available. I hope people like me have no say in it.

Well, it's the flip side of the sword that is ubiquitous video/photo capture, isn't it? On one side you get great coverage of the Capitol protests and the other, you get something that will be highly inflamatory in an already difficult part of the world. It is what it is. I'm just surprised that the military command has been so blind to the presence of video and photo equipment in places where these kind of images can be captured. Young people have a totally different sense of privacy and propriety in terms of what they share via the Internet, and the armed forces are made up of, largely,...young people. So, this is something that should have been anticpated and prevented by the commanders.

Mind you, I'm not complaining about pissing on the bodies. I'm complaining about the photography and the disemination of the photographs, and the fact that no one with responsibility prevented this.

BagOH2 -Not Warrior to Warrior, Warrior to SCUM. Had the Taliban been Warriors, they would not have been treated this way.

They hide behind women and children. They deliberately target medical personnel. The use women, children, and the handicapped to deliver bombs and as bait. They use protected structures (e.g. hospitals, schools, mosques) as firing points. etc.

When they start fighting as respectable Warriors, the Marines will no doubt treat them as such.

However, as has been pointed out, this is a complete violation of what is expected of our Marines and Soldiers and a lot of careers just came to a shattering halt.

Orion(I *AM* in the US Military, although the opinions I'm stating here are mine and mine alone. I do not speak for the US in any way, shape, or form)

Funny how it's the active duty Marines who massacred the families in Haditha, who killed two men in my battalion with a drone strike in Helmand and who urinate on terrorists and are stupid enough to make a video of it.

Yet they don't trust the reserve Marines.

I hope they get tossed in the brig, for their stupidity if nothing else. Whether they like the methods used in this war or not, the fact is that we are not fighting the armed enemy as much as we're fighting the perceptions of the war from home. They just lost a major battle. Idiots.

These ragheads can pound sand. I don't want to see one American hero get his career trashed because of this. Normal rules of war do not apply to these camel humpers because they are fanatical terrorists. Screw them and let them drink piss.

Eiaftinfo notes it: an enemy that tortures to death captured soldiers, teaches their kids to cut peoples' heads off, blinds girls for going to school... hear damn little about that. A few troops do this? OUTRAGE!! etc.

As to Karzai, well, not piss off: piss on him.

You want to know some part of what's behind this? Finding out the President is 'negotiating' with a Taliban bigshot to basically hand the place back over to them. You think that helps morale?

The most shockingly ironic quote on this story so far was the Taliban spokesman calling it "barbaric", followed in a close second by the spokesman from CAIR saying it breaks the laws of war.

If it indeed turns out to be true that members of our armed service were treating deceased enemy in this manner, their NCO should be prosecuted to the full extent of the UCMJ, with lessor sentences/penalties handed out to the men in question. Any officer on hand should receive double or triple whatever the NCO does.

None of which takes one atom of irony away from the Taliban and CAIR comments.

This is the sort of thing that will happen more often now that our leaders have declared it is perfectly okay to have avowed sodomizers of all stripes in the military. These actions quite reasonably will cause ordinary Afghans to doubt our motives--much more so than elitists clueless about the depths of natural defenses against sodomy will realize.

"This is the sort of thing that will happen more often now that our leaders have declared it is perfectly okay to have avowed sodomizers of all stripes in the military. These actions quite reasonably will cause ordinary Afghans to doubt our motives--much more so than elitists clueless about the depths of natural defenses against sodomy will realize."

"This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms."

Really? This act requires the "strongest possible terms"? Wow, I wonder what's left if we really get angry and start destroying cities wholesale (out of character for the US but par for the course for armies throughout history and the world.)

If people pay too much attention to this, that's telling me that our soldiers are doing an astonishing job. Because it's nonsense like this that tells us that the sheep are worried less about the threat of the wolf and more about the manners of the sheepdog. When the wolves are among the flock, the sheep don't care about where the sheepdogs piss.

"This is utterly unacceptable and should be thoroughly investigated by the appropriate authorities. If these were in fact US soldiers committing these acts, throw the book at them. I’d even go so far as to echo what the late Christopher Hitchens said post-Abu-Gharib about the perpetrators and treat it as an act of deliberate sabotage/mutiny/treason during a time of war and send them before a firing squad."

Whoa there fella, slow down. These guys will be punished but seriously, Treason? Mutiny? Give us a break.

Hitchens should too, but he's up there arguing with Saint Pete about not having a reservation.

Sad, as it only gives our enemies ammo in the public relations war, which, like it or not, we have to win as well.

If by “public relations war,” the commentor means hoping that they would please stop hating us and killing us – THAT is a war we will never win. They hate us because we are free, democratic and are infidels(not Islamic). The lack of a bit of pissing will never change that. I gave up long ago worrying about what Islam thinks about the Free World.

If this involved civilians or noncombatants, I would be pissed, and have plenty to say about it, but not being a warrior myself, I will not tell them how to treat the bodies of their vanquished in combat, who moments earlier were trying to kill them. This is between warriors. I wish they didn't do it, but I won't judge such men in that situation. I'm not worthy of that. I'm fine with whatever the Marine do about it, including nothing or the most sever punishment available. I hope people like me have no say in it.

I can’t go along with that, it sounds too much like equally invalid “chickenhawk” non-sequitor that is used selectively by some during elections. We have civilian control of our military for a reason and the men and women we send into harm’s way deserve our support because of the great responsibility that they have assumed. If and when some of them violate the trust they have been given, as appears to be the case here, we have our own responsibility to hold them accountable.

Giving the enemy a propaganda coup like this is utterly unacceptable just like it was with Abu-Gharib. The fact that the people we’re fighting have done and will likely continue to do far worse and with less outrage from the “international community” and the professional grievance mongers doesn’t change that at all. I think that most of the members of our military – particularly those who have served in combat – realize that this inequity doesn’t alter their responsibility and the increased danger created both to themselves and those they are charged to protect by idiocy like this.

I state unequivocally that the appropriate legal authorities need to thoroughly investigate this and if it was in fact US military personnel (and not a faked video which seems unlikely) who did this, throw the book at them.

"If by “public relations war,” the commentor means hoping that they would please stop hating us and killing us – THAT is a war we will never win. They hate us because we are free, democratic and are infidels(not Islamic). The lack of a bit of pissing will never change that. I gave up long ago worrying about what Islam thinks about the Free World."

No, that is not what I meant. Winning the hearts and minds of radical Muslims is impossible. And until moderate Muslims are willing to stand up to that radicalism, we can never change what they think, save through kicking their asses again and again.

But the support of our allies - weak though it is much of the time - is something we need to always consider. Not to mention the support of our own people, some of who may turn away from supporting our troops upon seeing things like this.

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta says a video which appears to show US Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghans is "utterly deplorable".

If the BBC is writing about our Secretary of Defense shouldn't they spell "defense" the way we spell it? This is an international affront and a failure of the British to recognize our independence and the lives of those soldiers who died in the Revolutiionary War. Disgusting.

If it indeed turns out to be true that members of our armed service were treating deceased enemy in this manner, their NCO should be prosecuted to the full extent of the UCMJ, with lessor sentences/penalties handed out to the men in question. Any officer on hand should receive double or triple whatever the NCO does.

And yet you sleep warm in your bed because rough men and women are willing to do violence on your behalf.Strange.

If we were fighting a real war, the way a real war is supposed to be fought, this would not matter in the least. That is does matter proves that we are not using our military in the way that it ought to be used. Nation building is bullshit. Hearts and minds is a waste. We pay alot of money for our great commanders, great soldiers and great weapons, and we should expect that they be used to destroy our enemies ... and nothing else.

And yet you sleep warm in your bed because rough men and women are willing to do violence on your behalf.

You betcha and should one of those “rough men and women” decide to violate the trust that they’ve been given and voluntarily accepted, they can and should be held accountable. This kind of juvenile garbage makes it more difficult and dangerous for the other “rough men and women” who take that trust seriously to do their job.

And yet you sleep warm in your bed because rough men and women are willing to do violence on your behalf. Strange.

I once did violence on your behalf. My entire family has and continues to (I have relatives in-theater, in fact). The next generation is already looking forward to it. I feel completely comfortable voicing my opinion on the matter in exactly the way I did.

Look, there is a need to distinguish between our own anger, sorrow and shame over the fact of this egregious breakdown in discipline, and the outrage expressed by the Taliban and their supporters.

The Taliban are an organization that, through its embrace of terrorism as a strategy, has forfeited any right to express outrage over ANYTHING we do. Their opinions on this issue can't have merit -- how could they? They're no more worth paying attention to than those of a child, or an axe murderer.

There are good reasons to pursue the culprits in this case, and take whatever corrective actions are required, but none of them have anything to do with what the vile Taliban may or may not think.

While I fully agree with Thorley Winston, I'm enough of a materialist to propose that, for the corpses, the worst insult isn't the pissing but the deadness.

From a purely materialistic perspective, I agree that it’s worse to be dead than to be urinated on. However the relevant perspective isn’t that of the dead who are past caring, it’s the people who are still living and observing who haven’t had either done to them.

As irrational as it may seem, many people get more upset over an injury or insult done to a third person than they do seeing them dead. Some people for example were more upset over whether people were being tortured or humiliated than they were over collateral damage. I remember seeing the photos of Abu Gharib repeated ad nauseum but I can’t think of the last image that I saw (if any) in a major news outset showing the body of an innocent person who was accidentally killed in a crossfire or in an airstrike.

It isn’t just people in the Arab world who feel this way, I remember frequent conversations with classmates in Crim Pro and Torts when reading a case in which a victim had suffered a horrific accident or assault and hearing someone say “I’d rather be dead” even when the physical injuries weren’t permanent. Logically you’d think it’s always worse to be dead but for some reason when people learn about bad stuff that happens to others, they often focus more on the injury or humiliation than they do contemplating how much worse it would be to be dead. I’m not sure why that is but it’s something that affects a lot of people in a powerful way and rational or not, it’s there.

Sarge, the reason I remember the quote is because he put it on the tape recorder he used for class lectures and, after all the yoot "culture" of the Vietnam era, I never thought I'd hear an American under 40 say, "God bless America".

@Thorley -- Wholly agree. That is the psychological framework that struck me rather strongly in this story. The fact that we are turning Taliban into corpses is accepted; once dead, the relation changes. They are no longer an enemy. In a religious or even a humanistic sense, the enemy becomes human again in death.

And this is fitting for our ethos. Respect for corpses, just as for prisoners, distinguishes between killing and murder; between killing and desecration.

The only reason they care is so they can score points with Liberals. Get enough points and you can do whatever the hell you want. Just ask Fidel, Hugo, and Obama.

What these marines did was wrong. But I'm not going to get my panties in a wad about it. As some have stated, a lot of careers just ended. Sounds about right to me. Careers. That's it. Discharge 'em. Period.

Some young men, all alpha-male types, in a group made entirely of alpha-males, did something stupid. Who'da thunk it.

As far as using the military as it's supposed to be used...you're right. The US military is made to battle other "traditional" armies. This is not that fight. The taliban is just one head of the Islamo-facist network.

You fight a pig in a wallow the pigs gonna win every time, and enjoy getting dirty. Fight unconventionally. Spec-ops and drone flights with hellfire missiles. Assassination is a Islamic concept. And instead of DHS checking paraplegic underwear at airports, undercover agents in mosques across America.

Or use the conventional military and wipe out every muslim in the world. That'll work, right?

"And yet you sleep warm in your bed because rough men and women are willing to do violence on your behalf."

I keep hearing this self-congratulatory admonishment to those who rightly protest our various and many wars and I keep wondering: just what violence done by rough men and women has protected me or my loved ones and fellow Americans or kept anyone safe...and from whom?

There hasn't been a war we've fought since WWII that has been in self-defense, or been necessary for our safety or protection, or been anything other than America's assertion of political dominance or our striking a claim for access to and control over material resources in other parts of the world.

Oh, I have no doubt many men and women in combat believe they're fighting the good fight to protect America and Americans...but they're wrong. They've been lied to and they kill and die for lies.

They're not soldiers. They're Marines.They don't like being referred to as "soldiers"

"Soldier" was good enough for George Washington, Robert E Lee, Teddy Roosevelt, and Douglas MacArthur.

Good enough for them, too.

Out of respect, marines should be called, "Marines", but there's no shame and a lot of pride and honor in "Soldier".

Robert Cook said...

"And yet you sleep warm in your bed because rough men and women are willing to do violence on your behalf."

I keep hearing this self-congratulatory admonishment to those who rightly protest our various and many wars and I keep wondering: just what violence done by rough men and women has protected me or my loved ones and fellow Americans or kept anyone safe...and from whom?

There hasn't been a war we've fought since WWII that has been in self-defense, or been necessary for our safety or protection, or been anything other than America's assertion of political dominance or our striking a claim for access to and control over material resources in other parts of the world.

WWII was the war fought to save Communism and the ones since have been fought to destroy it.

These dead Afghans are dead for marauding throughout the country, bringing violence and misery everywhere they went, but what is actually " simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms" is that these corpses got urinated on? Seriously?

I guess we'll just chalk this up to Karzai being a standard politician and completely lacking any sort of, you know, a sense of proportion.

There hasn't been a war we've fought since WWII that has been in self-defense, or been necessary for our safety or protection, or been anything other than America's assertion of political dominance or our striking a claim for access to and control over material resources in other parts of the world.

Oh, I have no doubt many men and women in combat believe they're fighting the good fight to protect America and Americans...but they're wrong. They've been lied to and they kill and die for lies.

-------------

Hey, Robert, are you a truther?

You never seem to answer this question.

But the tone of your above comments seems to suggest that you do not think the Afghan war was a war of self defense, thus suggesting that you are a truther fuckstick.

There hasn't been a war we've fought since WWII that has been in self-defense

Depends on what "self-defense" means. If response to a declaration of war counts, the war against Al Qaeda is in self-defense. Of course, if it doesn't count, then the European theater of WW2 wasn't self-defense either.

That aside, while most of our wars haven't been fought in defense of American lives, most of them have qualified as "defensive" in the sense that we intervened on the side of the defending party against the invading or aggressor party. Examples include Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and the European theater of WW2.

Probably better than WWII in the Pacific when Americans would decapitate dead Japanese soldiers and boil the heads to remove the flesh. Then the skulls were bleached. Many such prizes of war were taken or sent back to the USA. One famous picture in Life shows a pretty young American woman contemplating such a skull.

War desensitizes all who are in combat to killing and death. That loss of sensibility is a necessary defense for the combat warrior but also a moral and tactical challenge for the combatants.

The actions of the Marines were a serious breach of the standards of the Corps and of discipline.

That this seems to be the worst "atrocity" committed (or at least publicized) in a 10 year war shows how strong the discipline and restraint of these amazing warriors actually is.

Hey, Hamid, yeah, these nasty Marines didn't first cut off the head of those heroic Talibad jerks, so these Marines must be punished. After all, the proper way to deal with your capture or killed enemy is to cut off their heads, hang their bodies from bridges, and burn their bodies beyond recognition. Yep, that's the Muslim way.

This even is a political problem, but I think it's only made worse for us when our own government accepts and validates the cries of outrage. Doing so unruffles no feathers. It's a mistake not to push back with absolute moral clarity that we refuse to allow ourselves to be scolded. If our humanity requires higher standards it is only because WE are human. If THEY want to declare that THEY are not, then we need to say so. Turn the shame back where it belongs, to those who throw acid on little girls.

And slap the wrists of the idiot Marines involved. There is no doubt that they broke specific rules besides simply being stupid. But allow the double standard to stand? Who do we enable and what human horror do we enable when we refuse engaging in the moral level of this conflict? It's not just the hearts and minds part of it that we lose when we cede that battle.

Our enemy says, "Look! How evil you are!"

And our government and state department says, "Yes, look how evil we are!"

How does that win any moral argument? We're not at war with Lutherans, after all.

If it indeed turns out to be true that members of our armed service were treating deceased enemy in this manner, their NCO should be prosecuted to the full extent of the UCMJ, with lessor sentences/penalties handed out to the men in question. Any officer on hand should receive double or triple whatever the NCO does.

The stress of war takes its toll on the minds of men. Counseling for traumatic stress would be more appropriate. While socially unacceptable, urinating on a dead body isn't like what was done to Daniel Pearl or Leon Klinghoffer.

While we express our "disgust", we need to remember who the barbarians we are fighting are and have compassion for our own soldiers who are under great stress. This is far from Mai Lai or even Abu Graib.

"You betcha and should one of those “rough men and women” decide to violate the trust that they’ve been given and voluntarily accepted, they can and should be held accountable."

That trust goes both ways. We are not doing our part any better than these guys did. You may feel comfortable asking men to kill and die as well as act according to your standards while they do it, but I'll just say "Thank you, men." I would ASK them to think again about recording it though. That's a tactical mistake, for which they should be punished. It will simply encourage the populace to help the Taliban and resist us, while accomplishing nothing. That's the one and only outrage about it.

This whole argument, or perhaps the episode, is not over. I think it might have gotten a boost back when Fallujah was being terrorized, when our four contractors were brutally murdered and their bodies defamed. Or maybe when the first Iraqi walked into our lines wearing his, or perhaps, her, bomb vest and then went splat on everyone and everything nearby.

Or, maybe it was when an Afghani trooper decided he didn't want to be near these terrible Yankees so he kills those nearby; "Hey, we thought he was friendly, one of us, no!"

Hamid needs to figure out what he wants for a country, a nation, which Afghanistan is nowhere ready to be , and what consitutes an Afgani civil society; guess perhaps he needs more guns and vest and bomb sniffing dogs.

Meanwhile, our Pols go ape shit over some of our young and totally frustrated troopers acting out their feelings about being shot at.

OK, I buy Madame Hillary's cry some years ago: "They volunteered" for this. Doesn't make it better, does it.

These Marines, and Soldiers, and Airmen, and Coast Guardsmen are doing a great job, so bow slightly to the gods of "no," shake our fingers at our lovely miscreants, and let them go on doing what they can to stay alive and whole in body.

Edutcher wrote, "Soldier" was good enough for George Washington, Robert E Lee, Teddy Roosevelt, and Douglas MacArthur.

Good enough for them, too.

Out of respect, marines should be called, "Marines", but there's no shame and a lot of pride and honor in "Soldier".

I'm sorry but I don't agree. Nothing against Washington et al.. Washington is my number one hero and role model, but he'wasn't a Marine. It's not polite to object to the term "soldier" too strenuously, but we do prefer to be called Marines, not soldiers. Or you can get all formal and call us soldiers of the sea, but that's a bit obsolete nowadays.

I was having "relations" with a female friend once. to see if anything more was there (there wasn't) when something occurred down there that wasn't me. My wife insists that I got peed on. Being a somewhat naive fellow, I honestly can't say. So if you get peed on and you like it, more power to you. If you pee on your partner, let them know.

" We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights among which are , life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness...."But only if you're American.

All the same, our invasion of Afghanistan was not in defense of our country, and our decade long war there is not in defense of our country.

To the Left anything other than response to a full scale invasion of US soil by a uniformed army from a recognized nation is unacceptable – and maybe not even then. All the Islamists and their client rogue states have to do is NOT do the above and the terrorists have the Left’s full approval to murder, plot to murder and otherwise terrorize any innocents they like.

And if a rogue state decides to invade an ally? Well … that’s just fine and dandy and the US should stand by and watch it happen. Serves ‘em right for being our ally, by golly.

Harboring and giving safe haven to terrorists, allowing the terrorists to plot, train for and carry out 9/11 ? No problem. Why? Because the Taliban didn’t actually invade the US with an army in uniform … so the Afghan war is illegitimate. Get it? Yeah, me too.